


Enjambment

by allegoricalrose (SilentStars)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-26
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-02-06 09:04:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1852354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentStars/pseuds/allegoricalrose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ways in which he runs. From the prompt "running"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enjambment

_"The very first word I ever said to you. Trapped in that cellar, surrounded by shop window dummies, ohhh, such a long time ago. I took your hand, I said one word, just one word. I said: **Run!** ” _

She didn’t know him the first time he told her to run and she struggled to recognise him when he reminded her of the memory months later. But both times the word functions as an incantation, a vow of cool adrenaline and warm protection, and both times she places her faith in him. Both times he strives with quiet breath and racing hearts to prove himself, to keep her running at his side.

Running is what they do: running away from danger; running toward to help; running together in the long silver-green grass while the universe shifts on its axis to pivot around the point where their fingers touch.

—-

 _Now I become myself. It’s taken_  
_Time, many years and places;_  
_I have been dissolved and shaken,_  
_Worn other people’s faces,_  
_Run madly, as if Time were there,_  
_Terribly old, crying a warning…_ (-May Sarton)

It’s enough. Until it isn’t, and he finds himself running alone, his body leant forward, head ducked, hands fisted, feet pounding along the star-paved road he builds brick by frantic brick.

He’s running away from her even as he clutches her hand and pulls her warm limbs beside his own with a ferocity he hardly understands. He counts her breaths, wonders how many more can possibly be left in her lungs. Whenever they run from danger her breathing speeds up and each exhalation evokes a shudder of panic through his core. Time--time and the air in her lungs are running out.

Her human life is already but a tapered flame, burning swift and wild at his alter. As much as he aches to be consumed by her fire, to burn in the funeral pyre of her blaze, he’s even more aware of the evanescence of her incandescence. An unexpected breeze or a change in atmosphere or a drizzle of rain or a tumble through the air or-- With a lover’s sigh or the final panting of her breath in a faraway star cluster, her dense inferno will be snuffed out forever.

With a fiery kiss he’d died for her but he’d also risen straightaway from the ashes. If she dies running at his side…

So he doesn’t let her. So he reminds her under the moonlit sky, whispered low under the suspicious gaze of Sarah Jane. So he sprints with wide open eyes into the chokingly perfume French courtesan even when he’d rather be curled around his Hestia the library while she flicks through yellowed Victorian morals. So he talks and talks and never says anything at all; at least, not in words. So he leaves her behind in the protection of his timeship when they land at Canary Wharf and so he wraps a necklace with a gaudy yellow gem around her neck and wishes it were pearls.

So he presses another button and watches his world once again vanish in front of his eyes, leaving only a gaping hole and a void of nothingness in his hearts and mind.

It’s bittersweet but not surprising when she rematerialises seconds later, the ghost of his joy and sorrow, grinning and joking and setting his body alight with hope. But the wind picks up, it picks up and she’s a fearful parody, clinging desperately to the candlewax as she’s blown into the dark.

In the end, it’s _his_ fire that’s smothered, _his_ light that flickers and dies until there’s only numbness left. He’ll survive; he always does. And she’ll survive; that was never a given and now it’s as good as fixed. She can never die for him now that he can never touch her again and reinsert her into his timeline.

He’s run so far that he has lapped her by a universe.

—-

 _If you can fill the unforgiving minute  
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run… _ (-Kipling)

It takes the birth and death of his last chance at fatherhood and an impossibly gentle firecracker of a redhead to make him fully appreciate the meaning of carpe diem.

"You see that pain in there? It doesn’t mean you were wrong to let her in. It proves you were right."

Love hurts, but less so than regrets and running and detachment and intentional solitude. Love aches only because it has dug such a deep well of joy. Love stings but it’s also the balm.

Even with a time machine and the universe at his fingertips, even with more connections in his brain than atoms in the entire universe, he can’t manage a do-over, a second chance. But if he did—Oh, if he did…

After he drops off Martha and Donna wanders back to her room, he props his feet up on the console and allows himself a rare moment to daydream, to fantasise about what fixed events in his timeline he would change given the chance.

He wouldn’t wait for the right time that might never come: meteor showers or moonlight or the like. He wouldn’t slam her up against a wall and mark her skin in order to eradicate the scent of a competitor in the race and claim her as his own. He wouldn’t let fearful adrenaline running through his veins fuel a desperate and needy ‘giving in’. He wouldn’t let elated adrenaline sparking in his fingertips propel a relieved embrace and heady victory parade.

No. The second, the millisecond, the nanosecond he saw her he would run. Run _toward_ her light, her flame, her blazing wildfire, and he would burn with her.

—-

 _When she came running I was ready  
to make any bargain to keep her. _ (- Eavan Boland)

He ran.

Her hair glowed even without the moonlight, even without any stars to fall from the sky. There was adrenaline and longing and desperation and the need to possess and repossess her.

 _And_ he didn’t hesitate. His legs pumped more furiously than they ever had and he was running so fast he thought he’d never be able to stop, that he’d sail right off the curve of the earth and continue in perpetual motion for all eternity.

But he didn’t, of course, and the Dalek took no heed of his plans to carry her back to his bed and murmur his love in between ragged breaths while the entire multi-verse crumbled around them. And when all was said and done and he bargained his regeneration for her and he spanned two bodies and three hearts all beat for her—

Well, he kissed her. Well, she kissed him. Well, she kissed one him.

He would have kept her, memorised every second of their time together to play back with joy after the sun had set, ran _with_ her through time and space and pain and sorrow and delight and love and death.

But so would his solitary heart, the third heart he left with her for safekeeping. The pursued, the petrified sprinter, the pursuer, the spender of the unforgiving minute, and death’s thief: they're all worshipping her only a universe away.

And it's almost enough.

 _Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,_  
_And the rocks melt with the sun;_  
_I will luve thee still my dear,_  
_When the sands of life shall run._ (-Robert Burns)


End file.
